By Guillermo Kahlo - https://www.museofridakahlo.org.mx/es/frida-kahlo/fotos/#Guillermo%20Kahlo,%20Frida%20Kahlo,%201932, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93666811

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Frida Kahlo (1907-1954)

 Artist and Inspiration

Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) was an extraordinary artist who lived an extraordinary life.  Her life and work were a weaving together of creativity, color, passion, beauty, politics, gender, disability, personal suffering, and a love of Mexico. With creativity and sometimes amid great struggle, she followed (in the words of Howard Thurman) "the grain of her own wood," showing what it is like to be true to who we are and who we can become.  As an open and relational theologian, I see a creative spirit at work in her life whom I understand as God. God is not a bully in the sky but rather a creating and luring spirit at work in the world, yet also more than all of us added together. God is the universe plus more. Often people think that we are beckoned by this spirit to love others, which is true; but we forget that we are also beckoned to love ourselves. Self-love is as important as other-love, and we really cannot have one without the other. Self-love involves courage, stamina, creativity, and, sometimes, rebellion against social convention. We must say "no" to forces outside ourselves in order to say "yes" to the best within ourselves, so that we can add goodness and beauty to the world. Frida Kahlo knew the "no" and the "yes."

- Jay McDaniel, 5/6/22

By Alberto-g-rovi - Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=115425586

Frida

Directed by Julie Taymor

Vividly conveys the passion, creativity, and
fearlessness of one of Mexico's most colorful
and controversial artists.


​Film Review by Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat
reposted from Spirituality and Practice

​Frida Kahlo (1907 - 1954) was a brief shooting star in the firmament of Mexican art whose most ardent qualities were fearlessness, passion, and inventiveness. Co-producer and star Salma Hayek devoted seven years to bringing the story of this colorful and controversial artist to the screen. She found a soulful ally in director Julie Taymor (Titus) who matches Frida's daring on canvas with her own daring images on the screen. The end result of this collaboration is a captivating drama that will speak to the nonconformist in us all.

In the opening scene, Frida (Salma Hayek) is a student at a Mexico City high school where the great painter Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) is putting the finishing touches on a mural in the auditorium. She and her friends watch him seduce his model until his jealous wife, Lupe Marin (Valeria Golino), appears and verbally attacks him for his selfish philandering.

Frida's carefree life is shattered when she is seriously injured in a bus crash that leaves her with a broken spinal column, collarbone, ribs, pelvis, and eleven fractures in her right leg. Confined to a bed and abandoned by her boyfriend who goes overseas to study, she begins to draw and to paint. Some of her early work are unusual self-portraits revealing the grotesque damage done to her body and spirit. Thanks to an indomitable will, Frida regains her ability to walk but for the rest of her life she will be subjected to searing pain, numerous operations, and extended hospital stays. In order to numb the pain, the artist turns to alcohol and drugs.

Frida goes to visit Rivera to get his honest response to her art. He is impressed with what he sees and takes her into his inner circle of bohemian friends including photographer Tina Modotti (Ashley Judd) and painter David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas). Frida dresses up like a man for a family photograph at her sister's wedding and one evening does a sexy tango with Tina to demonstrate to those present her bisexual proclivities. Knowing that Rivera is an unrepentant philanderer, she goes ahead and becomes his third wife with the understanding that she'll overlook his love affairs as long as he remains loyal to her. Frida's prudish Catholic mother is appalled at the marriage between this elephant of a man and her daughter, a dove. It doesn't take Rivera long to return to his old habits of adultery. His new wife is most hurt by his seduction of her sister (Mia Maestro).

In his book Creativity in Self-Actualizing People, Abraham Maslow writes: "It seemed to me that much boiled down to the relative absence of fear. They seemed to be less afraid of what other people would say or demand or laugh at. . . . Perhaps more important, was their lack of fear of their insides, of their impulses, emotions, thoughts." Frida certainly fits these description. She was not afraid of strong feelings. This robust film salutes her fearlessness as she forges her own identity, spits in the face of tradition, and stands by Rivera, who repeatedly disappoints her with his addiction to sex. Nonetheless, they remain friends during their many years together.
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Frida's fearlessness also carries her through a nightmarish sojourn in New York City where her husband loses a battle with his patron Nelson Rockefeller (Edward Norton) over the content of a mural in Rockefeller Center, a miscarriage, a brief fling with the aging Leon Trotsky (Geoffrey Rush) during his stay in Mexico, and a brief imprisonment following his assassination. Salma Hayek was born to play this character, and she plays it full tilt. Director Julie Taymor pulls out all the stops with the surreal and smashing finale that includes the artist's triumphal entry in a bed to the one and only Mexican art exhibit of her paintings.

​The ​Bohemian Spirit

What is a Bohemian? BBC

​"Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the 19th century Parisian philosophy of life lived for art. In 1848 the young Parisian Henri Murger wrote of his bohemian friends: Their daily existence is a work of genius…they know how to practise abstinence with all the virtue of an anchorite, but if a slice of fortune falls into their hands you will see them at once mounted on the most ruinous fancies, loving the youngest and prettiest, drinking the oldest and best, and never finding sufficient windows to throw their money out of. Then, when their last crown is dead and buried...they go poaching on all the callings that have any connection with art, hunting from morn till night that wild beast called a five franc piece. Bohemianism meant a life lived for art, it meant sexual liberation and freedom from social constraint, but it also meant dodging the landlord and burning your poems to stay warm. How did the garret-philosophy of the Parisian Latin Quarter take over the drawing rooms of Bloomsbury and Chelsea, and why did a French war with necessity emerge as a British life-style as art? With Hermione Lee, Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and biographer of Virginia Woolf; Virginia Nicholson, author of Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939; Graham Robb, writer and biographer of Balzac, Victor Hugo and Rimbaud."

Confessions of a
Bohemian Wannabe
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Bohemian: a person (such as a writer or an artist) living an unconventional life usually in a colony with others.​​

I am a Bohemian wannabe. I live a conventional life, with a wife and two children living in middle-class suburb. If you saw me walking down the street, I would look a whole lot like most other people. I sometimes wear a corduroy sweater and people tell me I look like Mr. Rogers. Little would you know that, inside the shell of my middle-class appearance. there is a Bohemian wannabe.

​A Bohemian wannabe is someone who admires artistic people who live outside middle-class boxes of conformity: people like Frida Kahlo.

​A stereotype of a Bohemian is an artist, living in Paris or London or New York, sharing a studio with others in an arts colony, with barely enough money to pay rent or even eat, who is driven to create his or her art.

Frida Kahlo did not fit this stereotype, but she would certainly understand this person’s spirit. She lived with melancholy, passion, creativity, and authenticity. She was not afraid to say “I.”

She was a real Bohemian. I, by contrast, am a wannabe Bohemian. But maybe there's a little hope for me.  I am also a Christian, doing my best in a small way to share in the journey of Jesus. I want to be open to the Spirit of creative transformation in my time and way, as he was in his time and way. For Jesus, this spirit was a calling presence beckoning him and others to live in a new and dangerous way: a way of egalitarian love without excessive social structure. He was, in this sense, a communist, as was Frida Kahlo in her way. He went against many social conventions of his day, as did she.

I know there are differences between Jesus and Frida. She was an artist whereas he was, so people say, a savior. But he had his own arts colony: those who left home (and family!) and followed him in his counter-cultural vision, inspired by his Abba. Like Frida, he lived out the alternative vision. Like Frida, felt beckoned by something so beautiful, so powerful, and so compelling that convention had to be cast aside.

In the world of open and relational (process) theology we speak of this something as the spirit of creative transformation or the “lure” of God. And we recognize that it dwells within each of us and all of us as a beckoning to live truthfully: that is, to be true to ourselves and to the world.

If you feel a little calling in your own heart to say “yes” to life and “no” to the excessive confines of middle-class conformity, to say “yes” to beauty and “no” to triviality, to say “yes” to passion and “no” to sterility, I suggest that this calling is one way you and I alike experience the Abba – or the Amma – of the universe. It often comes with pain; it’s not easy. But it is the path best taken, and holy indeed.

I suspect that there's room in the world for Bohemian wannabes even as there's room for the real thing. What is important is that we Bohemian wannabes claim our inner Bohemian in whatever we can, channel our lives in ways that serve the cause of justice and beauty, and thus step out of middle class conformity in our own minds, independent of appearances to the contrary. We are in the world but not exactly of the world. We walk in the way of self-transcending selfhood, where we do not let the shackles of convention obstruct our commitment to love's freedoms.  Frida would understand, and so would Jesus.

- Jay McDaniel, 5/6/22
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